Supernova May Indeed be the Stuff Planets Are Made of......

An international group of scientists, using data obtained from NASA's SOFIA, an infrared observatory, have concluded that  supernova do indeed output enough material for planetary formation.

The groups observations reveal a particular cloud produced by a supernova explosion 10,000 years ago. The cloud contains enough dust to make 7,000 Earths.  

The researchers had evidence that a supernova’s outward-moving shock wave can produce huge amounts of dust. The question was - would the dust continue to spread, after encountering the interstellar medium - or be pushed back into the relative vicinity of the supernova. 

The team found that The dust survived the initial shock waves from the supernova event and continued "flowing into the interstellar medium where it can become part of the ...  material for new stars and planets..."

Check out the complete NASA article HERE

BMU #422 Isaac Asimov - Michael Juby - quantum computers - closest supernova in ages - Killer Robots

This week's episode (422) of Beam Me Up, my opening comments contain information on odd happenings with cube sat launches as well as near passes of a just discovered asteroid.

I end the the opening section with the opening theme music from the anime series Durarara!!

The first story of the afternoon is Phillippe and His Rather Boring  Time Travel (pt1) by Michael Juby.

This week from the Beam Me Up - 

Google wants to create sentient robots and to that end are working on quantum computer chips.
Chandra observes one of the closest 1a supernovas in decades. 
Spitzer space telescope has observed a large asteroid collision.
Will Robots of the future be mercy killers?

The final story this week is part two (ch 2+3) of Isaac Asimov's The Last Question.

Earth Visible Supernova Possible in Next 50 Years?

According to THIS "The Daily Galaxy"  - 

• Astronomers  calculate: the odds that, sometime during the next 50 years, a supernova in the Milky Way galaxy will be visible from Earth.  the odds are much better at nearly 100 percent that such a supernova would be visible to telescopes in the form of infrared radiation.

 The Daily Galaxy reports:

• A new study suggests that they have a solid chance of  detecting a supernova fast enough to witness what happens at the very beginning of a star going supernova. 
• Professor of astronomy at Ohio State,  Christopher Kochanek said, “We see all these stars go supernova in other galaxies, and we don’t fully understand how it happens. We think we know, we say we know, but that’s not actually 100 percent true...."

This Daily Galaxy article is really very good.   Check it out HERE

Image of a Supernova Ring

Supernova  1987a

1987AOn February 23, 1987 in the Large Magellanic Cloud a star exploded with enough energy to be seen all the way across the universe. The Super Nova took place in an irregular satellite galaxy of the Milky Way and was photographed recently by the European Space Agency’s Faint Object Camera. The FOC is part of the science platform aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

The photograph taken by the FOC shows an image of a gaseous ring surrounding the central supernova remnant. Most interesting the photo shows clumps and spaces in the ring. As the article in The Daily Galaxy blog reports that this:

• indicates that the material is not uniformly distributed.

New Born Super Nova Discovered

Science Digest reports that in the annals of Radio Astronomy - a first has taken place.

Astronomers have managed to take photographs of the youngest supernova yet at a mere 14 days old! This sets a record for the earliest photos of a supernova yet.

The photos were taken in June and place the exploded star in the galaxy M 51. This object is also known as the Whirlpool Galaxy because of it's pronounced spiral formation and is apx. 13 lightyears from Earth. M-51 in English is also part of the "hunting dogs" constellation associated with Bootes constellation.

The crew that took the photographs used a technique that allows several widely separated telescopes to be combined to simulate a telescope hundreds of miles across. Telescopes in Spain, Sweden, Germany and Finland were used in this project.

complete Science Digest article here

New Type of Neutron Star & Their Super-Nova Event Observed

First, I know it's a bit redundant but we really should cover what IS a neutron star. When a giant star ( at least eight solar masses) can no longer support its' massive atmosphere, (first by fusing all the hydrogen then on to the more massive elements,)explodes the upper layers of the photosphere and driving the core to collapse until electrons are driven into the core of star's remaining atoms making the core into ultra massive neutrons. So dense is this material that a teaspoon would mass thousands of tons. They are so massive and warp space around them in such an odd fashion that many believe that black holes are in fact some odd flavor of neutron stars.

Now astronomers have found that neutron stars come in two distinct types and possibly their associated super-nova as well. From the Daily Galaxy article:

• In a paper which will be published this week in Nature, Professors Christian Knigge & Malcolm Coe from the University of Southampton worked with Philipp Podsiadlowski of Oxford University to reveal how they have discovered two distinct populations of neutron stars...

Really? I just got a handle on one flavor and they go and throw Rocky Road into the mx.... check out the article here on the Daily Galaxy blog

Oldest Super Nova Explosion discovered

From the Daily Galaxy magazine:

• Astronomers have discovered the oldest and farthest supernova ever detected -- a massive star that exploded 11 billion years ago.
• Prior to this discovery, NASA’s Swift Observatory had detected a 13-billion-year-old gamma-ray burst.... but this latest discovery marks the first confirmation of a full-on star explosion.

First thing this shows is that the first 2 billion years, the Universe was a VERY busy place. It was a hot dense and inhospitable as you could imagine.

Rare Yellow Hypergiant Star Discovered

What is hugely larger than our sun, set to shortly explode in a mind numbingly powerful explosion, has rings of ejected material with the mass of four of our own sun and..... wait for it.....Yellow! Hard to believe but this weird creature is indeed a super massive star on the fast tract to a super nova.

This star is in a very rare class called a hyper-giant. These stars are so massive that it is impossible to maintain their massive outer layers for not much longer than a few hundred million years before the outer layers crash down onto the core causing a titanic explosion.

In this infrared photo captured by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope array you can see the bright central star with the two huge ejection rings.

from the Daily Galaxy

Brightest Supernova in 40 Years Observed

Astronomers are studying the nearest and brightest supernova of of a type that has not been observed for 40 years.

Discovered in the Pinwheel Galaxy, M101, a spiral galaxy a mere 21 million light years away, located in the constellation Ursa Major, better known as the big dipper.

From the article:

• The supernova, dubbed PTF11kly, is still getting brighter, and the team's best guess is that it might even be visible with good binoculars for days.

Wiki article

Science Digest


Thanks to Dan for bringing this to my attention

Scientists Unraveling Catalyst of Supernovas

Astronomers have been using type 1a supernovas as a baseline for determining the expansion of the universe. So it becomes somewhat a sore spot when they have to admit that understanding how supernovas function or more to the point, what exactly "lights the fuse" of these titanic explosions.

Most astronomers feel that the mainstream explanation fills the bill best. From the Yahoo News article:

• Type 1a supernovae are formed when a white dwarf star -- the collapsed remnant of an old star -- becomes unstable after it exceeds its weight limit.

This instability could come from several different causes, like"

• the merging of two white dwarfs
• or accretion (of) material from a sun-like companion

Recent studies using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have results that suggest nearly all the supernovae studied came from two white dwarfs merging. Supernova through accretion should be approximately 50 times brighter in x-rays than actually observed. Further study needs to take place however to determine if this is indeed the case in all types of galaxies and not just elliptical.

Understanding how supernova work can go a long way to understanding dark matter and galaxy formation.

Complete Yahoo News article submitted by Tim Sayhill

Red giant Betelgeuse may go supernova?!

Shaun Saunders sends in a VERY interesting article from Fox news online. It seems that the red giant Betelgeuse (the bright red star in the left shoulder of Orion) may soon explode in a supernova - this according to data released by UC Berkley.

The indications are pretty startling all in themselves. Betelgeuse's enormous size would have once reached all the way out to the orbit of Jupiter if placed in the center of the solar system has begun to shrink, as much as 15% already. Scientists will watch the star over the next few years to see if the shrinking continues. It may also rebound. This type of behavior is thought to precede the final cataclysmic explosion as the star "exhausts one fuel" and switches to more denser materials to fuse. Star's need to keep the fusion process going to hold up their massive atmospheres. Stars (especially super - massives like Betelgeuse) are thought to begin this size fluctuations as they fuse all their hydrogen and switch over to helium and finally the process ends with iron. At this point the fusion process can not hold up the star's outer atmosphere and it collapses onto the core releasing more energy in a few moments that an entire galaxy.

Should the supernova event happen, Earth would be in for a spectacular show. Betelgeuse is 600 light-years away, and so may have already exploded.

Now this reminds me of Shaun's story Last Light (available in his book Navigating in the New World) which concerns a race destroyed by a gama radiation blast from a super nova. (when the explosion starts, huge amounts of gama radiation are channeled in beams from the north and south pole of the star. Should a planet be in the path of this beam, said planet would "cook" very much as if in a microwave. Though to be completely fair, GRBs are extremely rare events. Check this article out for more info on GRBs)

complete Fox news online article

Studying exploding stars has its challenges. In particular Type Ia supernovas, where temperatures reach billions of degrees. But someone's got to do it, so Robert Fisher and Cal Jordan at the University of Chicago’s Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes have organized a team of scientists who will

"expend 22 million computational hours during the next year on one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, simulating an event that takes less than five seconds"

That according to a release just out from the University of Chicago News Office.

Imagine...such resources are necessary in our primitive 21st century to engage in what for us seems extreme exploration; but the University of Chicago, a U's U, is hosting and footing a lot of the bill.

Doubtless with some DARPA bucks. For from time to time a nationstate must contemplate the utility of its personal store of mini-nova makers. GreenWarriors may even want to explore whether there might be some way to capture all the useful energy emitted from even a tactical nuclear release, let alone theater- class devices. How many cities could be illuminated by the capture of the energies emitted across the sonic and radio spectra by a single standard-issue atomic fusion or fission? Is it possible to measure? Maybe the su;pernova guys will have an answer. Investors will surely want to know.

The God Shiva would be proud. Oppenheimer of the Los Alamos bomb team boasted to the trident-bearing entity "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds."

Maybe now it's time to amend it by adding "provider of consumer power at competitive prices."

(NASA/CXC/Rutgers/J.Warren & J.Hughes et al.)